Mostly Beagles, Babies, and Books...

Happy Friday! We had a super busy workweek, and we are so looking forward to a vacation. CM comes with me to the office a few days a week, and she is a trooper on weeks like this one! We have a trip planned in the next few weeks to the Bahamas for my sister-in-law Leah’s wedding (#GuanaGetMarried!), and we can’t wait to celebrate with her and her wonderful fiancé Matt. This will be our longest trip since CM has joined the family, but she is such a good-natured baby, I am certain we will have a great time! Any tips for traveling with a wiggly 9-month old???

Anyway, here are a few things that have brought me joy this week:

Playdates

This week, one of my best friends from high school came down to Seacrest on vacation. Her little boy is only a couple of weeks older than CM. We drove out to spend a day with them, and oh boy! These babies were a hoot! They were very interested in each other and watching them interact was so much fun. Sorry for the photo overload… I could not pick my favorite!

Reading to Babies

Excuse the mess on my child’s face, but she is always eating… An article I highly recommend is How to Raise a Reader, which recommends reading to babies as early as possible. In the last few weeks, Carla May has gotten very interested in holding books and flipping through the pages herself. We’ve started keeping a stack of board books on the bottom shelf of the coffee table so they are always within her reach. Now that she can crawl and choose where to play (to some extent), I always smile when I see she’s crawled over to the board book stack! I try to rotate the books in the “easy access” stack so that she doesn’t get bored (so punny, haha) and keeps coming back for more.

A Bookish Podcast: From the Front Porch

From the Front Porch is a podcast I’ve recently started listening to that I have really been enjoying so far. The co-hosts Annie Jones and Chris Jensen (of The Bookshelf in Thomasville, GA) are obviously very intelligent and well-read. Their banter is witty and oftentimes hilarious and their book recommendations are great. Both hosts read a lot of ARC’s (Advanced Reading Copies, a term I didn’t know before listening to this podcast), so they are able to recommend books before they are released to the public. I particularly enjoyed Episode 119: The Politics of Being Southern, in which Annie and a special guest discuss life in the South, and Episode 128: Love It or Loathe It?, in which Annie, Chris, and other guests had a book club-style discussion of Priestdaddy, which I also read this month (totally coincidence).